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Woolly mammoths disappeared from Siberia and North America about 10,000 years ago, along with other giant mammals that went extinct at the end of the last glacial period. Current competing hypotheses for the mammoth's extinction point to human hunting or climate change, possibly combining in a deadly one-two punch.
Despite decades of study, the issue remains unresolved and hotly debated. But paleontologists may have found an ingenious way around the logjam. According to the team, an isotopic signature in 15 tusks from juvenile Siberian woolly mammoths suggests that the weaning age, which is the time when a calf stops nursing, decreased by about three years over a span of roughly 30,000 years leading up to the woolly mammoth's extinction.Image credit: University of Michigan
